Posted 4 years ago on Sept. 21, 2012, 6:01 p.m. EST by hazencage
(58)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

look anyone who has been there obviously knows that Occupy Wall Street is not leaderless, and such things as the GA are merely devices used to mask the "True" Leaders of occupy. In my opinion I think some aspect of it is run by anon, adbusters, and enforced by the anarchists/radicals.

84 Comments

the ultimate conspiracy theory-
for decades, the brothers have been trying to consolidate their economic power into political power
they took over the tea potty
the tea potty took over the republiclan potty - with total success

what - oh what to do next? I can hear them now ----
"The Ds are too free thinking and they use reason -
they will not swallow our crap."
"But now that we own one side, we HAVE to control the other side"
"What if we create a TP like movement for the socialists, anarchists and Democrats?"
"But they will organize behind strong leaders like MLK or Feingold or Sanders and become our opponents in stead of our property"
"The answer is simple - pre-set it up as a leaderless, disorganized, horizontal group based on consensus and anti-government"
"GREAT-
...and they will spend all of their time and effort attacking each other rather than us!"
"until they give up and evaporate!"

You know "End the Fed" sounds so radical and even democratic, and maybe The Fed ought to be replaced by a bank owned by the people along the lines of Kucinich's proposal but yes, I see the End the Ded movement as being against any intervention to blunt the impact on the masses of the financial collapse. As bad as it is and as top loaded as the QE's have been they are probably what 's keeping things from going back to the very very bad old days of 2008.

End the Fed is based on the logical fallacy that "because bankers thought of it, then it must be evil". By the same logic, the US constitution is evil because it was written by slave-holders.

I don't know I think the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has more to do with stopping the free-fall than did the QE. Since there is a liquidity trap, monetary policy is not really going to help.

According to Greenspan himself, "the data do show that the expansion of assets has had very little impact on the economy". Greenspan is one of the worlds most prominent monetarists, so if even he can't see the benefit...

tell that to an Obama or Romney supporter. Most of them, not all of them, will just accuse you of supporting the other guy and dismiss anything you have to say. Say things like "your guy is bought off. Ours isn't."

the majority of people do not think corporations and banks run "their side" of the government. They are more than willing to believe the side they don't agree with is bought though. Why else would they willingly vote for people if they think they're bought by corporations and banks?

Of the two parties that are controlled by corporations and banks, one consistently panders to ignorance, fear, religious zealotry, bigotry, xenophobia, classism and free-market fundamentalism. The preference for those qualities (except for the free-market fundamentalism) are not determined by corporations and banks. That is their demographic. Those people already exist in the US.

//and they will spend all of their time and effort attacking each other rather than us!"
"until they give up and evaporate!"//
No eventually what would happen is that occupy would become small enough for someone considered anti-status quo to move in and assume complete control of the group. Just look at all the other leftist political cults....They didn't all start out small, and cultish.

Ironically, there allegedly is no true leader for the same reason that Mitt Romney won't release more than a couple of years worth of tax returns.

The moment the returns are released, aka Occupy gets public leadership, the "other side" will have a field day knocking that entity to the ground.

I've given a solid alternative, focus on the number one way that wall street and the banks are destroying main street. They use one simple rule that they themselves don't follow to destroy mainstreet...

Debt restructuring requires a default first.

When the banks had to restructure their own debts created from their own fraud securitization schemes, they did not have to default.

However, the government basically fhen forced the banks to be their enforcer against main street, and rob and steal anything they could get whenever a main streeter asked for a debt restructure.

Main Street's debt restructure requires defaults, the rich elite get to restructure their debts without having to default.

That would make a powerful protest point and a leader would not even be needed to make it.

There's a semi-secret circle of people that oversees OWS organization. They often meet in a small anarchist coffee shop in Manhattan. Jart and Zoe are part of that group, so are those who write the news articles for this website.

Obvious there are leaders, that's why almost all Occupies are structured the same -- GAs with consensus driven decision making -- which means no decision making. That's by design.

David Graeber seems to be the puppet master -- the social scientist/anthropologist based in London. He probably sees himself as a social engineer. It's his design. Fraud by design. He's so brilliant that he front ran a whole social movement, but designed it to fail.

Too bad David, we've only failed initially. We need to throw off the consensus model, come to real decisions and make real demands. That's how we'll reach the still sleeping, that's how we'll reach those lost in misery as they slide out of the middle class.

OWS hasn't even appealed the ruling that kicked us out of the park. NLG said there was no body capable of making the decision because we were leaderless -- I'd laugh, if I weren't crying.

IIt's amusing to me that in one breath you are denouncing David Graeber for his supposed dictatorial powers

And in the next breath you are using those same dictatorial powers that you citicized in him saying, "We ought to throw out the concensus model."..... which BTW is the very concept that keeps this movement accountable to the people

Yes the "concensus model" is a cumbersome one, and the process has been made all the more difficult by people who are there soley to be disruptive,

Or by people who believe that they have all the answers and anyone who does not agree with them is fair game for their rabid wrath. These people have very big EGOS. < ?

Your criticsim is not without any merit though, as other Occupiers have thought the horizonatal/concensus decision making process does not work well, albeit few have your fiery, misplaced name-calling rhetoric.

The other difference is, many of them joined OWS affinity groups. Some of these groups adhere to the principles of OWS closely, and some do not.

Yet other people joined affinity groups outside OWS where the decision making is even more stream-lined

One of the things that all these people share in common is rather than bitchng 24/7, they are taking positive action....... Are you?

I think more important than a leader is a OWS party line. A clear Policy on public good. The middle class foundation that was laid out by our fathers and mothers, g-ma's and g-pa's, and since abandoned by both donkeys and elephants.

I am located in an area that does not have a strong occupy presence. The half dosen or so members that meat at the county courthouse once a week do more to keep the groupe small through infighting than anything els. I have not been to one of there meetings in a few months. Long story short, I'm not aware of Unity Principles. Though by the name it sounds like there is already the framework for an occupy party line. Are these Unity Principles agreed upon by all occupy groups? What are they?
I found a short list of principles on the post: Found on GA site...comments? Is this what your talking about? If so, I think those are great but I was talking about more of a political plan.The kind of thing the partys put together at there conventions only with a bit more substance.

It was a suggestion. There currently aren't unity principles. Anyone can call themselves an OWSer. This is both good and bad. It creates a big tent with many creative ideas. However, unity principles would focus our message and could attract additional adherents if they forcefully speak to America's problems (particularly saving the middle class).

A first unity principle could simply be, for example, that societies should be organized to answer peoples needs, not corpoRAT greed. Under that umbrella other principles could be worked out.

the unity principles seam to be heavy on philosophy and light on implementation. I think this is a hard sell. I think actual policies that help grow the middle class would be easer for people to galvanize around.

It would be nice, but they have no interest in doing so. Consensus decision making is either dictatorship by the ingroup or mindless groupthink (such as the Egyptian Tahrir demonstrators chanting "the army and the people are one" and then going home while their comrades were still being held by that same army and without insisting on creating a caretaker government).

The people involved with organizing Occupy stuff in the different occupies throughout the country often get labeled as leaders because they actually DO something to make events and actions happen. (i.e. they put real time and energy into making it happen.) And the people who bitch and moan that there are "masked" leaders are generally the people who go to a meeting or two, say a few things, but don't actually do anything beyond talking about their discontent.

And then of course... there are the folks who only sit behind computers spewing lame crap on internet forums...pretending they are active-ists...

I think it's safe to say that 99% vs 1% is a binary obsevation. I see the 1% as the enablers of democrats and republicans who insist on a binary political system. To combat this we need another binary situation- you are either going to vote democrat/republican or you aren't. In a world where information is stored as a 1 or 0 isn't this expected?

It seams their have been a multitude of leaders vying for control. Maybe we should celebrate that we have maintained our independence until we've done the hard work of solidifying our political position.

Every group is influenced by its members. There will always be clusters of agreement between smaller groups. There may come a time when we elect a leader but until that time we remain undefined. Policy first, leader afterwards.

In Occupy Philly one of our sponsors was called Jobs with Justice, and their involvement helped to exploit a anti-mayor nutter sentiment and used this to further their own goals. Eventually Jobs with Justice left because the financial committee did not handle the money well enough, but then food not bombs came in and it became about feeding the homeless and fighting city ordinances that are often an obstacle for the practices of "Food not bombs".

I originally heard about #OWS when I started following some Anonymous Twitter feeds last year after my company's web site was hit with a DDoS attack. For weeks before the Zuccotti encampment, I thought that the whole thing was entirely the product of Anonymous. Because of how aggressively they were trying to organize protesters and because of how I wasn't hearing anything else about it from anywhere else.

AdBusters still gives ideas to Occupy by writing articles about what OWS should do. They called for flashcamp sites at the beginning of the summer, and now they are calling for protesting capital hill on Halloween.

Also, many prominent OWS organizers are from Canada. Some moderators on this site are from there as well.

This is a news site for OWS. The forum has little to do with OWS. It's people pretending they're still in college basically, babbling about ideology, etc... OWS on the internet will 'evolve' as our president likes to say and to take a phrase from the dems, 'where else are you going to go?'